Why does the market need so much laborers?

[Sandor]

Markets needs 12 laborers by default, a pretty high number if you compare it to the rest of "roles" (only the mines needs more than that!). Why is that? Is there any actual difference between 2 traders and 12?

Is there any way to know which professions will result on them acting as laborers when they're not working? (like the farmers in winter)

Thanks!

[Gazer75]

The market workers have to go fetch stuff from the storages. If you have a lot of stores around then you need more of them to collect it all.

[Palad1n]

actually the markets do not need 12, that is the max they can have, I only assign 1 to it, and that person carts resoures around just fine for a population of 40-60.

You have to manually toggle jobs off , such as farmers, if they have no work during the winter. Toggling their jobs will default those citizens into laborers. Just takes a little getting used to.

Hopefully most of your homes are all with the market's radius? If so, those homes will get set up properly with what they need, instead of seeing a few homes hording tons of food, etc.

Good luck!

[Mk1]

You have incorrectly assumed that the worker assignment corresponds to the building as a "need", you can actually set it to 25 on that structure but you should get by with just 1 as long as you have lots of stockpiles to prevent all the labs from going all the way to the market.

Where it says 1 of 12 press the downwards arrow till it says 1 of 1. You will be fine :)

It is a shame the ingame help does not point out that structures only need 1 man to function, though some, like fields dont work as well with 1

[Dravere]

All professions will default to laborer tasks when 'idle' for whatever reason (e.g. when your stock limits are hit, blacksmiths will do laborer tasks, etc).

Markets can have up to 12 by default, but you do not NEED that many, by any stretch of the imagination, at least in early games. For your first market place, you probably only need 2 or 3. Additional vendors increase the total amount of each item available in the market (To a point), as well as increases the speed at which they can gather the materials to fill said market, and distribute them to needy places. Bare in mind, vendors also seem to stock any industrial buildings within the radius as well (woodcutters, tailors, etc). This makes them unbelievably powerful in the early game as you essentially assign the vendors to be delivery boys for all your random crap to any building that needs it. If no vendor is available, the building that needs the item will go and grab it itself (which can lower efficiency).

Tl:DR, more vendors = faster things flying around town, improving overall efficiency. Only need to stock lots of vendors if you have a massive town with storage buildings placed a long way away from the market.

Ideally, you want to build a market ASAP, stock it with ONE vendor, and let him be your little running bearch early game, reducing the amount of food people take, and preferably dump said market place about one buildings length away from an early gatherer / hunterer / forester combo building. Yes i can hear you screaming WUTHUFOCKMAN THATS LIKE CUTTING INTO THEJ RADIUS BROGHO OMGOMGOGMOGM well you can just stfu because the efficiency created by the marketplace with a nearby storage building, and a raw materials dump, can almost double your gatherer hut per season (Currently have a gatherers fetching nearly 2k from about 1/3 of a forest size, on a new map, with a very small pop, and sitting at 2 gatherers in job)


Christ this is a little longer than i thought.


TLTLTLDR vendors are fine at 1 or 2 early game, increase if you have crap far away. Radius of marketplace is SUPPLIED not GATHERED FROM so if you have some freakin beans on the other side of the map, that poor little fellas runnin for freakin miles.

[Mk1]

The vendors should be renamed "teamsters" if you played tropico :)

[Sandor]

Hmm... then this game should introduce in the in-game help some "default" values for every building. Because I got a pyrric outcome out of my mines and quarrys with 1-4 miners, I supposed that my market needed lots of workers too. I seem to be unable to get more than 40-60 citizens without them starving (actually it's pretty funny. They go up to 90 adults or so, and then start dying by dozens until they hit 40, and then start growing again), so I'll try employing less people on my market.

All of my houses are in the radius of the market, so no problems there :)

Still, I say that it should be good to have some default values. Because I also see that some buildings can be "overloaded" with workers (for example, the fishing docks, those accept way more than 4 people), but I don't really see any improvement when doing so.

[Dravere]

not just houses. Everything is good to have within the radius that you want that market to do. If mines are within the radius, vendors will fetch stuff that gets produced. Farms, gatherers, hunters, EVERYTHING benefits -hugely- by local markets with a good amount of vendors available. The reason this isnt mentioned in the help file, is that this is a game about finding the balance in resources, that includes HUMAN Resources, and is part of 'figuring out the game'.